


Five Times Ben Didn't Eat

by neversaydie



Series: more than you bargained for [5]
Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: College, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, F/M, Food Issues, Gen, Genderqueer Character, High School, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, ben arnold is a stressed bean, emily has no time for nonsese, grisham is a weasel, implied/referenced eating disorder, no explicit ED discussion, nonbinary ben, troy is a good guy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 18:43:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15297672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neversaydie/pseuds/neversaydie
Summary: Five times other people noticed Ben didn't eat.And one time he did.[in which Ben Arnold is a stressed bean from high school to the present day.]





	Five Times Ben Didn't Eat

**Author's Note:**

> TW: minor character death (grandfather) in part 3, non-explicit reference to vomiting in part 5. No explicit ED behaviour or thought discussion throughout - all are outside POVs on someone's behaviour.

**1**

Marshmallows around the top of hot chocolate always look weirdly burnt to him.

Not because they are burnt, merely because they've absorbed the brownness of the drink and gone gooey, sticky around the edges and underneath where they've swelled and melted. They're not crispy, they're soft and dissolve on his tongue without chewing. Ben knows this, intellectually, but the texture still surprises him when he takes a tentative sip of Nisha's drink after she pushes it across the breakroom table for him to try.

"You're right, that's better than Starbucks," the sweetness feels thick in his throat, and he has to swallow around nothing a few times to get it to go away.

"Oh, shit, I forgot it's dairy milk," she takes the cup back quickly, shooting him a guilty look as if she's fucked up somehow. "Sorry, Ben."

"Nah, it's okay," he waves her off, absentmindedly shredding a corner of the napkin which came with his bagel. The deli two blocks over from the office is a favourite, whenever they get a chance to eat lunch together, but the old lady behind the counter always gives Ben free food like she's trying to fatten him up.

It's kind, and he always perks up when someone's kind to him, it's just… a lot, sometimes.

"I thought you didn't eat dairy?" Nisha raises one neatly-pencilled eyebrow and Ben feels like a moth under glass - pinned by her gaze. He feels like that a lot around people, but especially Nisha, and especially at work. "For kosher?"

"Please, that boy eats more bacon than a hungover football team at brunch," Josh interrupts, unhelpfully, looking far too pleased with his metaphor even as Ben rolls his eyes. "He just tries weird diets and doesn't want people to ask questions."

"Why?" Nish looks surprised, and Ben has to swallow again because the cloying marshmallow sweetness won't go away. He's only had a sip and it feels like he's getting a sugar rush… or maybe that's just nerves. He gets antsy when anyone pays too much attention to how he eats - anyone who isn't his mom, anyway.

"It's interesting, I don't know. I like the challenge," he stands up abruptly when he glances at the clock on the wall, yanking up his baggy shorts when he realises his panda print boxers are on display. "Shit, I gotta get upstairs. Kowalski's gonna murder me."

"Take your bagel, oh my god,"  Ben has already dashed off by the time Josh yells after him, leaving him chastising the closing break room door. "Who raised you?!"

"That boy is… very odd," Nisha stares after him with a frown, while Josh shrugs and pulls Ben's abandoned plate across the table towards him.

"Hot, though," Josh grins at her through a mouthful of lox and cream cheese, very amused when he disgusts her into rolling her eyes. He never really pays attention to Ben's food habits, except to notice that he sometimes ends up with two meals because Ben's ends up on his plate too.

But then, what else are boyfriends for?  


**2**

Ben does some seriously weird stuff with food that Sammy doesn't understand.

His whole energy drink/cereal 'Ben Arnold Special' was bad enough, but the rest of his odd meal combinations are more idiosyncratic than idiotic. Usually he eats like a normal person (and he certainly drinks enough coffee to explain the times Sammy doesn't see him eat during breaks at the station), but sometimes his choices are… weird.

Plain canned tuna as a 'meal', picking the filling out of a sandwich rather than just eating the whole thing, finding something utterly disgusting until he smothers it with hot sauce and then declares it edible (okay, maybe the last one just isn't Sammy's taste)... none of them are strange enough to actually cause him alarm, but some of the habits remind Sammy of Jack when he'd get weird during the college rugby season a little too closely for comfort.

As they start spending more time together as friends, rather than just co-workers, Sammy notices that Ben prefers to eat each thing on his plate separately - pancakes first, then bacon; fries first, then the burger patty, then the vegetables, then the bun - and is totally willing to abandon anything he decides has gone prematurely soggy because it's been tainted by something else on the plate. Again, not super weird, but not something he'd expect from a guy in his late twenties with the metabolism of a hummingbird.

Sammy remembers being permanently hungry at that age, whereas Ben seems to run entirely on caffeine and sugar.

One time they go to grab a late dinner at Rose's before the show, and Ben's fries come with barbecue sauce already drizzled over them rather than on the side. Sammy watches Ben's face fall and then freeze tightly into a mask of being _fine_ … until he switches their plates without a word.

"You don't have to do that," Ben says quietly, voice oddly strained as he looks at his new plate of untainted fries while Sammy swaps his perfectly reasonable cheeseburger for Ben's BBQ-chicken monstrosity.

"It's okay, I'm not a sauce weirdo," Sammy snorts lightly and kicks his friend's shoe under the table, and Ben perks up with a genuine smile despite the teasing.

Sammy doesn't like barbecue sauce, but that's not really the point. Having to endure Ben happily trying to burp the alphabet after eating a full meal is worth it. Gross… but worth it.  


**3**

"I'm so sorry for your loss, Benjamin."

Steven Grisham has been coming around more often since Zayde got old (really old, the kind of old where sometimes he didn't know who Ben was and once tried to hit him until Betty intervened), and Ben likes him a lot. He doesn't think the guy is dating his mom - he'd be a lot more wary if that were the case - but he's helped out a lot, especially when Betty had to take time off work and Ben bagging groceries at the Bent and Dent at weekends didn't fill the gap in earnings.

Ben admires the man, quietly. Steven wears suits and ties and owns a business in town, and he always asks Ben how he's doing in school and talks like it's a foregone conclusion that he'll make it to college, rather than something which feels entirely unattainable some days. Sometimes he gives compliments in a way which makes Ben's stomach hurt, like he hasn't done as well as he should have, but all that does is motivate him to do better.

"It's Ben," he mumbles, holding a wilted cheese sandwich in the napkin in his hand. He doesn't intend to eat it, he just didn't know what to do with himself when he walked into the community hall. He doesn't think he's really eaten anything since he went in to take Zayde his morning coffee before school and found him lying still - more waxwork than man. "Thanks."

"How are you holding up?" Steven has a glass in his hand but doesn't seem to have drunk any of the contents, and Ben suddenly wonders if he'd feel better with alcohol in his system. He and his friends only got drunk in the woods behind the Meyers' place once, on Troy's daddy's stash of moonshine that he'd long forgotten about since his last stint in jail, and Ben doesn't really remember if it made anything feel better or not.

"Okay, I guess," Ben shugs, ripping a corner off the bread on his sandwich and squashing it into a tiny ball of dough. It's not a great wake, but a lot of people in town chipped in and showed up to pay their respects - Zayde was pretty well-liked around the place. Ben feels inadequate in Steven's nephew's borrowed suit, but his eyes are dry. "Mom's sad."

"I'm sure she is, buddy. It takes a long time to get over losing someone, especially when you've got a kid to worry about," Steven claps him on the shoulder and guilt curdles in Ben's empty stomach. He drops the squashed dough ball when he suddenly gets the shakes all over - fine tremors of adrenaline telling him he can't deal with any of this. "You take good care of your mom, okay? You're the man of the house now."

Ben locks himself in the bathroom down the hall and throws up nothing until the shaking subsides. He doesn't want to be the man of the house (he doesn't want to be the _man_ of any house, which is a thought too terrifying to touch), he doesn't want to be the reason his mom is sad, and more than anything he just wants his zayde back to make everything okay again.

He slopes back into the wake after a while, red eyes easily explained by the crying he hasn't done. Nobody even noticed he was gone.  


**4**

"I don't want to hear two words about it, Ben Arnold. You were never this fussy when I babysat you."

"Honestly, Mary. I ate back at the station."

"Oh sure, and if I ask your little friend I'm sure he'll say the same thing. Don't you lie to me, kid."

"Mary…"

"No buts. I got enough on my plate to worry about without adding you to the pile," there's the thunk of a plate being set down on the kitchen table. "Put that in your face and shut it."

"I'm-"

"You're worse than my kids, Ben. Don't make me call your mom."

"Okay, okay. Jeez," he's trying to sound jokingly petulant, but Sammy can hear the edge to it. Huh.

He waits until Mary leaves - to attend to whichever kid has started yelling from the backyard -  to enter the kitchen, and walks in to catch Ben with his plate over the sink, about to put the toast down the garbage disposal.

Huh.

"Hey, man," Ben breaks out into a sunny smile, although it's somewhat undermined by the dark circles under his eyes. He's been tired all week, but had waved off Sammy's suggestion that he didn't have to come check on the Jensens with him tonight. Since Emily was taken he's been… weird. Exhausted, but wired. "You want some toast? Mary made it, but I'm not hungry."

"I'll take half," Sammy shrugs, forcing himself to stay nonchalant as he grabs one of the pieces and takes a bite. He used to do this with Jack sometimes, when he got a little too obsessed with whatever diet he was following for training and needed a reminder to come back down to earth, and falling back into the habit with the wrong person feels like pressing on a bruise.

The trick works, and Ben eats the other piece without complaint. Sammy files that information into the part of his brain which catalogues the more unsettling aspects of life in King Falls, just in case it's needed.

He really, really hopes it isn't needed.  


**5**

Troy fidgets nervously next to the sinks in the boys' bathroom, waiting for the sounds of retching to stop from behind the locked door of the last cubicle. He needs to get back to class, but the do-gooding part of him can't leave in case whoever's getting sick needs escorting to the nurse.

Troy's good at helping people, and it's one of the things he clings to as making him totally different from his daddy and his old man's repeated stints in jail. He's already tall for his age, a lanky beanpole forever being asked to fetch things down from high shelves or walk girls home from the bus stop when it's dark in the winter evenings, and he prides himself on never walking past someone who seems in need without at least offering his assistance.

So when Ben Arnold emerges from the stall, puffy-cheeked and with pinprick bruises dotting his eyelids, Troy only considers leaving for half a second before he just throws himself right on in.

Ben freezes at the sight of him, a deer in the headlights blink making him look guilty for reasons Troy doesn't understand. They haven't got along for a few years now, despite Troy's best efforts to reconcile their friendship after the sugar glider fiasco, but that's neither here nor there with the stink of puke hanging heavy in the air around them.

"You okay, Ben?" Troy is surprised by the way Ben goes red like he's embarrassed, although shoving past him to get to the sink is pretty standard behaviour. "Want me to walk you to the nurse?"

"I'm not sick," Ben's voice sounds rough and painful, deeper than usual in a way Troy would admire if it wasn't the result of puking his guts up, and he looks like he's been chewing on his knuckles as he washes his shaky hands in the dingy sink. That's being sick if Troy ever saw it.

"You sure sounded-"

"Leave me alone, Troy," Ben adjusts his hoodie in the mirror and then zips it up, shoving his hands in the pockets and still not looking at his ex-friend. He hasn't grown where Troy and their other classmates have shot up over the past year before becoming seniors, and despite their current differences, Troy hopes Ben will finally hit a growth spurt soon so he doesn't have to worry about being small all the time - he gets picked on for his size enough as it is.

"I ain't gotta go with you, but I can tell Mr Sheffield you've gone to the nurse if-"

"Fuck off, Troy! I'm fine!" Ben spits it out with a sort of wild look in his eye that catches Troy off-guard, then seems to realise he's been too harsh and shrinks into himself, oversized hoodie swallowing him up as his shoulders deflate. "Sorry. I gotta go, I got class."

"Ben-" but he's already gone, leaving the door crawling closed against the anti-fire hinge which makes it so difficult to open in the first place. Troy watches after him with confusion, knowing that something just happened here but not understanding what exactly it was.

He briefly considers telling someone about the weirdness (even if it's just his mom, or his girlfriend Loretta), but even law-abiding Troy knows one hard and fast truth about King Falls: snitches get stitches.

Ben passes out in gym class a week later, and Troy helps him to the nurse without so much as an 'I told you so'. He never does find out what Ben's weird behaviour was all about.  


**+1**

"Take a break."

"I've just got a few more-"

"Every link you click on takes you down another rabbit hole, we've been over this. More than once," Emily closes the laptop for him and ignores Ben's indignant squark entirely. "Don't make me sing Hamilton at you, Benny. There's a whole song about it."

"You know that's not a threat, right?" Ben does a terrible job of pretending to leer at the prospect of Emily singing showtunes at him, and she just rolls her eyes. The hollow look of his face and permanently desperate edge to his voice takes some of the comedy out of his attempts to be flippant, has done ever since Sammy decided to leave.

Sometimes, Emily is glad she wasn't here to see just how deeply fucked up Ben got while she was abducted - if the way he's losing it over Sammy is anything to go by. He hasn't been sleeping, eating has totally fallen by the wayside, and pretty much everything else in his life has been put on hold in favour of research into how to get Jack Wright out of the void.

Every dead end and day passing makes him more desperate… and more determined. It's admirable and scary in equal measure. Emily doesn't know how he's still on his feet, right now.

"Come on, you need to eat something and then take a nap, at least," she closes his notebook too, which makes him stiffen under her touch. He's been sitting at her kitchen table since he got back from the most recent radio broadcast - Emily's surprised his back hasn't locked up entirely - and she's running out of patience. "I'm not a babysitter, you've got to start taking care of yourself."

"I don't have _time_ ," Ben pulls away from the hand on his shoulder - actually _pulls away_ , which Emily doesn't think he's ever done with her before - and reaches for his notebook ('thought journal') again. "It's… It's only a couple of weeks until his contract is up, and if I don't… I don't have time, Em."

"And if you make yourself ill and _have_ to stop, who's going to work on keeping him here then?" The way his face falls makes her heart ache, and she leans down to press a gentle kiss to the lank curls at his temple. He needs to take some self-care time all around - she's never seen him with an almost-beard through lack of shaving before. "Benny, it's time to take a break. For me."

"Okay," Ben sighs quietly after a long pause, and lets his hand fall into his lap instead of opening up his research again. Emily's more relieved than she realised she would be - maybe she's been more worried than she thought. "Can I crash on your couch?"

"Sure," she reaches over the table and grabs a banana from the fruit bowl, putting it down in front of him and raising her eyebrows at the way his nose wrinkles up. It's cute, but she's not about to indulge any nonsense.

Emily's always been a practical person - she and her mom share the trait, and they've always approached problems head-on with no time for complaining from whoever's coming with them to the solution. This situation is no different, even if Ben's problem isn't something she can fix.

Much to her surprise, he takes the implicit instruction at face value and peels the fruit with slightly unsteady hands. She leaves him alone to take a shower as soon as he actually takes a bite.

Ben is passed out cold on the couch by the time Emily emerges, snoring softly with his mouth open. She throws a blanket over him and rolls her eyes when she sees the empty banana skin left on the table, not the trash can which is a couple of feet away.

He's a slob, but he's her slob. They'll work this whole thing out, together.


End file.
